One of our favorite web browsers just got a cool new tool in the form of Stylebot, a new Chrome extension that allows you to access and modify the CSS for any web page from within the browser.
That’s right — users get a completely customized design experience for any page they choose. The changes they make can be saved for later use and synced across multiple devices.
This is great news for you design enthusiasts as well as for end users with specific needs and wants for their browsing experience. For example, the extension makes web pages with small fonts more accessible by allowing users to increase the font size, and it can make browsing the web less commercial by removing ads.
Stylebot generates a sidebar full of basic and advanced CSS options that allow the end user to manipulate how content is displayed. This tool is simple enough to be used by a moderately competent consumer, but it also has options better suited for those with web design skills. Stylebot can be used to change font attributes, remove advertising, move page elements, change colors, write one’s own CSS selectors and quite a bit more.
Googler Rachel Shearer wrote the following today on the company’s blog:
“For example, a Stylebot user with special reading needs might change a webpage by removing images, picking new text and background colors, and even moving blocks of text around. And Stylebot saves the custom style they create, so the next time they access that page the changes will still be there. Even better, they can sync their saved styles across computers so that webpage will always appear with their preferred style.â€
Check out this brief demo video to see Stylebot in action:
Stylebot was created as a Google Summer of Code project by Ankit Ahuja, a computer science student in New Delhi, India. Stylebot is open source and forkable; interested parties can check out Ahuja’s source on GitHub. He said he used elements of other open-source projects, such as Aristo and Firebug, in his work.
What do you think of Stylebot so far? Would you use it to prettify the ugliness that is Craigslist, for example, or to simplify content viewing on a news site?
Reviews: Craigslist
More About: accessibility, chrome, chrome extension, Chromium, CSS, design, designers, Google, google chrome, stylebot, web design
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